On GPG/PGP Keys…

Way back in 2010, I attended the GSoC Mentors Summit. I thought that would be a perfect time to get a new GPG key signed by a lot of people. Unfortunately, I decided to do this the night before flying out to Mountain View. With the lack of sleep, long flight, and busy weekend, I promptly forgot the passphrase to that key. For quite a while, I tried to remember or somehow guess the passphrase, to no avail.
Continue reading... →

Fun at the GSoC Mentors Summit

Last weekend was the GSoC Mentors Summit. As a mentor for the Pidgin, Finch and libpurple project, I attended for the first time this year. It was pretty interesting and a lot of fun, but I have to say I didn’t really feel like much of a geek there! Everyone’s either got an iPhone or a Droid, and they’ve all done awesome stuff. Can you say you’ve worked on WordPress, used by millions of websites, or Apache, serving even more websites, or RTEMS, running several space exploration instruments and other consumer products, or who knows what else?
Continue reading... →

Mentoring a student for GSoC

So last week the accepted proposals for GSoC were announced. Pidgin was given 4 slots. First up, we have Ivan Komarov working on improving ICQ. I don’t really use ICQ, so I can’t say much, but if you do, hopefully there’ll be a lot of great things coming out of it that will be useful to you. Next up is Adam Fowler working on a better chat log viewer. People really seem to complain about what we have now and at the very least, it’s kind of slow once you have a lot of logs, so there should be room for some good improvements there.
Continue reading... →